🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct13.062810.43806@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>     However we have strayed far from the question we began with.  I'm
>interested in the pragmatic status of scientific assumptions, made
>because without making them science would be impossible.  That is,
>I'm not trying to distinguish between scientific hypotheses and
>other assertions, but between what I take to be two kinds of
>scientific assertion, for example those in (a) vs. those in (b):
>
>     (a)  Air has weight.
>          Space is curved.
>
>     (b)  The physical laws that hold locally, hold throughout the
>               universe. 
>          There exists a reality outside ourselves which we are
>               capable of understanding.

I agree that this is an interesting question.  (I certainly had no idea that
things like (b) were what you had in mind; I was thinking more along the
lines of "living things evolve by a gradual process of mutation and natural
selection of genes".)

Your first example under (b) is more a definition than an assertion.  Any
difference in what happens locally which is different from what happens
elsewhere are counted as differences in what is present; *by definition* the
physical laws are the same.

The second example is one without which scientific research cannot proceed
(although "which we are capable of understanding" might be qualified; we
need not believe in perfect or even asymptotically perfect understanding
in order to do research).

>  My problem is that (to hark back
>to the Cosmological Bad Dream) there are scientific utterances that
>I don't know whether to assign to (a) or (b), such as a detailed
>description of the first three minutes in the existence of the
>universe.

I think these things are clearly in category (a).  Why should a detailed
description of the first 3 minutes of the universe be any less of an
assertion than a detailed description of Paris last summer?  In neither case
can we go back and look.  We make the best guess we can based on the
evidence; we are prepared to modify it if new evidence disproves it; and
there will always remain some residual doubt, since the evidence is
necessarily incomplete.  The evidence in the case of the first 3 minutes of
the universe is more sketchy, and so the amount of doubt is higher; and it
may indeed be the case that the public does not understand the appropriate
level of doubt and inexactitude for these kinds of statements.  But this is
a conventional problem of misunderstanding, not anything fundamental.